Or when a good Mexican cop is working with the DEA. A few years ago, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo sent an earnest young police reformer, José (Pepe) Patiño, to help clean up Tijuana's corrupt police force. "Of all the [Mexican police] I've ever worked with, he's the only one I ever felt was honest," says a DEA agent who has investigated the cartel for years. For his safety, Patiño lived in San Diego. But in April 2000, two Mexican federal police comandantes — who had been polygraphed, vetted and trained by the U.S. to serve in a "clean" new antidrug unit — allegedly lured Patiño and two aides into a trap in Tijuana. Patiño's head was crushed in a pneumatic press, agents say, and the mutilated bodies were found in a ditch the next day. (One of the crooked comandantes has been arrested; the other is still a fugitive.) The cartel's message was clear: challenge us and die.

So, how do you fight an enemy who has both more money and more firepower than anyone else and fewer scruples about using both ruthlessly? Some fear President Vicente Fox might not live out his term — largely because he has shown signs of being ready to take down the cartel. His dreams of a united hemisphere will never be realized so long as the Mexican justice system is viewed by U.S. officials as addicted to drug money.

U.S. drug cops were encouraged by the extradition last month of one of the cartel's top bosses, distribution maestro Everardo (Kiti) Paez Martinez, whom Mexican police had arrested nearly four years ago. The extradition — the first ever of a Mexican citizen to the U.S. — caused celebration among jaded U.S. agents because Paez is a potential gold mine of cartel intelligence. Coming one year after the arrest of Ramón's partner in gore, Ismael Higuera Guerrero, who carried a special knife for his stylized mutilations, the Paez extradition makes it harder for the Arellano brothers to circulate freely through the streets, nightclubs and boxing matches of Tijuana and Southern California. "That's what really upsets them," says Chavez. "They can't go out and party anymore."

Trapping Benjamín and Ramón is still almost impossible to imagine, short of all-out war. Mexican authorities, however, "know where the brothers are," insists Jesús Blancornelas, 65, editor of the Tijuana weekly Zeta. Because of his reporting on the cartel — which included publishing letters from mothers of Ramón's victims calling Ramón a coward — Blancornelas was shot four times in broad daylight in 1997 by a group that included Ramón's main hitman, David Barrón Corona (a San Diego gang member who was himself killed by a stray bullet between the eyes during the botched assault)." If the will is there, and I think it is," says Blancornelas, "it could happen soon."

But most Mexicans believe that U.S. customs agents are also on the take and permit some vehicles to cruise through border inspection stations in exchange for money. Just last month José Antonio Olvera, a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector at Tijuana•San Ysidro border crossings, pleaded guilty to taking almost $90,000 in bribes to let drug shipments through. (Olvera claims he did it because the cartel had threatened to kidnap his five-year-old son.)" If relatively well-paid U.S. agents aren't immune to it," says one Mexican prosecutor, "how can we expect Mexican police to be?"

Still, Patiño's murder may have bolstered Mexican government resolve. Soon afterward, the Mexican army, acting on CIA as well as DEA tips, arrested Ramón's buddy Higuera at one of his houses south of Tijuana as he partied drunk and naked with two Colombian women. And patience with the Arellanos may be wearing thin among the Colombian cartels, which are often led by cultured narco-dons who view their Mexican allies as sloppy and uncouth nacos, or hicks — a gang, U.S. agents say, that had to bury a DC-7 in the Baja desert six years ago because it had failed to tell the Colombian pilots, who were delivering 20 tons of cocaine, that landing in the sand would wreck the jet engines.

The Colombians also grouse about the cartel's recent inability to make payments, according to Mexican informants, a sign of weakening revenues. Another indication: new competition from "grasshoppers," who are circumventing Tijuana and going right to Los Angeles without paying the Arellanos' fee — as proved by last month's record U.S. seizure of 13 tons of cocaine being ferried overseas by Ukrainians. No one is suggesting that the era of the Arellanos cartel is over, but as DEA agent Chavez says, " We're definitely pushing back."